In various peer to peer networks it is often desirable for a device to be able to broadcast a small amount of information about itself relatively frequently and to be able to recover similar information being broadcast from other devices which may be currently in its local vicinity. This allows peer to peer devices to discover information about one another and remain situationaly aware. Typically there is a limited amount of air link resources available for discovery purposes, and resources allocated to discovery are normally unavailable for other signaling purposes such as peer to peer channel traffic signaling.
In the case of unicast transmissions it is a common practice to adapt coding methods based upon Signal Interference Noise Ratio (SINR) feedback from a receiver to more efficiently use available resources. However in the case of broadcast channels this is normally not practical. In broadcast channels, including some peer discovery channels, there is typically no channel SINR feedback from receivers.
It would be desirable if a metric other than SINR feedback from a receiver could be used to adaptively control broadcast transmissions, e.g., peer to peer discovery signal transmissions.